“Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't have to write it.”

Saul Green in "The Golden Notebook"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

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Do you have more details about the quote "Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't hav…" by Doris Lessing?
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Doris Lessing 94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … 1919–2013

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Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it's perfectly true. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in Wrinkle, not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it.

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